Amazon was hardly alone in “destroying bookstores.” Amazon didn’t exactly spring fully-formed from Jeff Bezos’s forehead, and for much of its early life, the source of bookstores’ destruction was…other bookstores. Does nobody remember You’ve Got Mail? Nor is Amazon exactly alone in mistreating employees. (Anyone remember the halcyon days when it was retail shops like Wal-Mart that got all that flak?)

Many self-publishing authors would certainly say that far from “destroying” that profession, Amazon has made it for them. It’s funny that Amazon gets the blame for “undercut[ting] the advances authors use to buy time to write something.” It’s not Amazon who pays those advances, it’s the publishers. If the publishers can’t afford to pay advances, they either need to start trimming the fat or simply stop doing business with a store that is allegedly putting the squeeze on them. It takes two to have a business arrangement.

That also accounts for Timberg’s complaint that Amazon is pressuring publishers. Amazon isn’t a charity and neither are the publishers. They both want the best terms they can get, and neither one of them has to do business with the other. That’s business.

Timberg has a bit of a point when he says that Amazon has effectively monopolized the e-book marketplace. Yes, it certainly has, but whose fault exactly is that? If Amazon got to the top by way of dirty tricks, let’s see the evidence of that. As I’ve said before, it looks a lot more to me like Amazon got to the top simply by being more competent than all its competitors.

Amazon’s far from the only big company in the industry, and certainly not the only one who had enough money to throw a bunch of it away loss-leading—that’s not a dirty trick in e-books any more than it is when Wal-Mart does it in print books. Amazon’s genius was in making it so dead simple to buy and read e-books on Kindle that even grandparents could and would do it. Nothing was preventing Amazon’s competitors from spending their money on the same things.

Heck, even the major publishers could have done it. Their revenues dwarfed Amazon’s early on, after all. But no, they weren’t interested. So they ended up with the e-book market they richly deserved.

Really, it is amusing to consider just how much has changed in those twenty years since Amazon—since those early days when Barnes & Noble’s conquest of local bookstores was considered enough of a major danger that it was the subject of a Hollywood movie. Who could have imagined back then that the “real” danger was a little on-line start-up formed to let customers buy books by Internet mail-order instead?

Now Amazon is the big bad bogeyman, and bygone bogeyman Barnes & Noble is a sinking ship. So it goes, I guess.

Earlier today, Fortune reported that Barnes & Noble has tapped Sears Canada CEO Ron Boire to take over as B&N’s CEO. Boire has been the CEO of the struggling Sears Canada for just 10 months, but before that he was the head of the USA Sears & Kmart chains for three years. Before that, Boire had worked at Sony, Best Buy, and Toys’R’Us—not exactly a list of winners in the recent economy. And now they expect him to turn Barnes & Noble around?

[Update: As Nate pointed out in the comments, the Fortune article is really badly constructed. It turns out that Boire is not taking over as Nook’s CEO, but as B&N’s. Publishers Weekly has a much clearer piece. I find it a bit weird that suddenly B&N now explicitly does include the retail trade stores plus what’s left of the Nook, given that I thought B&N had been trying to salvage the B&N retail trade division by paring the sinking Nook away from the rest of the retail store, which is actually doing substantially better. But hey, if Boire’s job is to try to salvage both the Nook and the stores, so much the better; it means I can leave the rest of what I wrote without changing it much.]

Yeah, best of luck with that. The retail store division actually seems to be doing more or less okay these days—largely because it’s been doing things like changing from a books-only store to more of a toy-and-electronics-boutique-that-also-sells-a-few-books place. But as for the Nook, I’m starting to think it’s a little too late for the struggling e-reader format. Bring someone in new to rearrange the deck chairs however you like, the Titanic is still on the way down. After all, what is there left to do by this point?

Ever since we discussed the Nook’s new site on the podcast earlier, I’ve been poking around the new version of BN.com and trying to make sense of it. It’s interesting, but in a sense it’s also a bit of a lost cause. I have nearly 200 e-books in Barnes & Noble’s catalog—largely the remnants of my purchases from eReader and Fictionwise’s catalogs when Barnes & Noble finished shutting them down—and they are almost completely inaccessible now from Barnes & Noble’s web site.

Not that this is exactly a surprise. Back in September 2014, Barnes & Noble removed the ability to download Nook e-books outside the Nook ecosystem. But until recently, you could still at least read your purchases from Barnes & Noble’s web site. Now, that doesn’t seem to work anymore either. As Nate reports on Ink, Bits, & Pixels, attempting to view one of your e-books instead takes you to the store page for it, inviting you to buy it again—except you can’t because you already own it.

That being said, it’s still possible to access all your content via the Nook applications. I tried the Windows 8/8.1/10 app from the Windows Store, and it seems to work just fine (though for some reason it waited a half hour to install), as does the Nook Study app that Nate linked when Barnes & Noble changed the Nook’s DRM key in March. Likewise, the Nook Android app works fine on my phone. All of them are able to access my complete library, and download e-books from it to read.

I’d rummage further and see if they were storing those downloaded e-books somewhere to my hard drive, except I don’t need to—I haven’t bought any B&N e-books since 2011, and I had long since backed those (and my old Fictionwise titles) up into my Calibre. I simply haven’t had any reason or desire to buy any more e-books from Barnes & Noble. I even used my e-book lawsuit settlement credit not on more e-books but on part of a Blu-ray they had cheaply that nowhere else did and I wanted. I’ve bought my last-ever Barnes & Noble e-book; I’m done.

It wasn’t so much a conscious decision, like the one Juli made last year, as it was a simple recognition that B&N simply didn’t have any e-books Amazon didn’t have, too, and it was just easier to deal with them after I bought them from Amazon. None of the crazy stuff Barnes & Noble has done over the last year or so had anything to do with that, given that I stopped in 2011—but then, none of that crazy stuff exactly made me regret it, either.

I feel really sad for B&N. Where did they go wrong? Let’s leave aside any shred of the idea that they had the expertise of a paper book chain trying to do business in an e-book world. In March 2009, they bought Fictionwise/eReader, one of the earliest e-book companies in the business—the people I bought A Fire upon the Deep from back when state of the art was a Palm IIIe. That was over a decade of expertise in the e-book industry, at a time when the e-book industry birthed by Kindle barely even a thing yet. It was at least as much e-book-industry experience as Amazon (who had bought similarly-early company Mobipocket) had.

People get caught up in the idea of Amazon as the super wheeler-dealer, moving e-books by pricing them at $9.99 even if they had to lose a few bucks on some of them here and there. But all that was just window dressing. Amazon’s real coup was simply in making its e-readers so darned easy to use that even grandparents were happy to play with them.

(Sure, the $10 e-books did help them justify the added expense of buying one of these $300+ devices—buy a dozen or so books and it would pay for itself in money you saved, the idea went—but it didn’t take very long at all for at least some Kindles to fall to below $100, which is where they’ve been for at least the last couple of years.)

Has Amazon even done anything new vis-à-vis the Kindle in the last few years? Oh, sure, they’ve spiffed it up with new features, decreased the price, and even added the new subscription programs—but are those really more than icing on the cake? At heart, the Kindle is still the same simple device it’s always been: an always-available window to the Amazon web store, ready to buy you a new e-book whenever you want it. It still works pretty much the same way it always has.

But what has Barnes & Noble done? You would think that it shouldn’t be such a hard act to follow, simply to build a web store that could sell you e-books and plug a reader into it, especially since they just bought a company known for doing exactly that. It shouldn’t exactly be rocket science. Shouldn’t a simple e-book store that’s always right there in your pocket or purse just work no matter what company makes it? Yet neither Barnes & Noble nor Kobo seem to have been very successful.

I’d like Amazon to have strong competitors. Strong competition would mean Amazon would have to compete, including possibly dropping prices or making other features available. I’d like to be able to comparison-shop and buy my e-book from wherever has the best price or other terms at the moment. But at the moment, the only company that makes it simple for me to download the book I just bought and incorporate it into my own backup solutions is Amazon. And it doesn’t look like that’s changing right now—Ron Boire or not.

Proprietary e-book formats have been around for quite some time. Most major commercial vendors use proprietary formats to one extent or another, be they Amazon’s Kindle format or the proprietary DRM that Barnes & Noble and others put on top of EPUB. Given that they help to chill competition and keep Amazon firmly on the top of the e-book hill, they are generally not accounted to be a good thing by publishing industry activists. But I ran across a provocative post at Digital Book World suggesting that they might actually be a good thing after all.

Joshua Tallent says that “proprietary formats just work,” and that they permit the e-book store to optimize its reading experience to make books look best on its own platforms. He thinks that advocates for EPUB and other open standards should learn from how these formats work and use that knowledge to make the open standards better.

On the other side of things, Andrew Updegrove calls Tallent’s article “egregious.” He points out that while e-book vendors could theoretically make books look better on their platforms, most don’t bother. The proprietary formats are used mainly to keep customers buying from that one particular e-book store. While other sorts of products, such as cell phones, are broadly compatible with each other (in terms of being able to call someone on one brand of device from another), you’re not going to be able to read multiple e-book formats on the same device, unless it’s a tablet and you install their individual reader applications.

I’m not sure that cell phones are really the best comparison, given that the main purpose of phones was originally to place calls to other phones but that isn’t necessarily true anymore. Today, now that most cell phones are full-fledged digital computers, they’re primarily used for other things—and there’s no guarantee that the software you install on one particular phone will work on another. But that’s probably beside the point.

As readers pointed out in comments on Updegrove’s post, Amazon built its own format before EPUB was even a thing, and hasn’t had any need to add EPUB compatibility to the Kindle. Why would it? It only cares about people buying e-books from Amazon. Any ability to add other vendors’ e-books to it is strictly incidental. (Which also means it can do things like preventing other e-book stores from emailing their titles directly to the Kindle.)

All that said, I think the quest for interoperability between e-book device vendors is probably a red herring. It would be nice to have available in theory, but in the real world, very few people would actually bother using it.

Interoperate If You Want To

First of all, did you ever notice that Amazon doesn’t actually do much to prevent people from interoperating if they want to put in enough effort? Apprentice Alf’s DRM-cracking plug-in for Calibre still works as well on Kindle e-books as it did when Alf first came out with it. Amazon has never bothered to try to change up its DRM to block it. Compare that to Apple, who has a track record of frequently updating its DRM to lock out cracks.

For that matter, apart from Apple, none of the other major e-book DRM vendors seem to bother updating their DRM, either. You can even crack library e-book DRM with Alf and Calibre, which you’d think should be a matter of grave importance to publishers who rely on its protection—but apparently it isn’t.

I imagine Amazon and the others probably recognize that only a relatively few tech-savvy folks even bother, so it’s not worth the added expense of trying to outpace them. Calibre isn’t exactly the most user-friendly app in the world. Even using the program by itself requires a level of expertise many ordinary people don’t have, and the process of setting up the DRM-cracking plug-in can be downright arcane. I believe that a lot of people who use Calibre take for granted how much they know about computers to let them be able to do that.

No Sideloading Zone

The thing is, though, that for many Kindle users, even the process of sideloading e-books is beyond their expertise or even their comprehension. Even leaving aside user-unfriendly conduit software like Calibre, they have to plug stuff in, and open windows on their computer and drag and drop—it’s a nightmare! Hence, I have my doubts that many people would take advantage of “easy” interoperability even if it existed.

Just look at Baen. Baen has sold DRM-free e-books for a decade and a half, but even when it was allowed to email the books directly to people’s Kindles, that was apparently still too hard for most of its would-be customers. Baen kept getting asked why its e-books weren’t “on the Kindle” yet. It finally had to resort to making sweeping changes to how its e-book store worked in order to get its titles on Amazon’s Kindle store—because that was where all the customers were.

If Kindle owners couldn’t be bothered to buy from one of the longest-running e-book vendors in the business, even if it was set up to email the books right to their devices after they bought them, what good would it do to make the Kindle interoperable with other e-book stores? Maybe a few people would take advantage of it, but most of Amazon’s millions of customers would shrug and go right on buying from Amazon, because all they have to do is tap a button on their screen and they have a book. And the same would hold true for Barnes & Noble’s customers, and Kobo’s, and Apple’s, and so on.

Publishers Interoperate

And really, why should they even want to buy from somewhere else? The publishing industry already “interoperates.” The major publishers and many self-publishers sell the same e-books through all different places. You can buy, for example, Neal Stephenson’s new novel Seveneves from Amazon, or you can buy it from Barnes & Noble, or Kobo, or Apple. And since the major publishers seem intent on re-imposing agency pricing, and everybody’s letting them, it will cost exactly the same in every store. So there is literally no incentive to buy it from anywhere other than the store you already use anyway.

This does work just as well as an argument for why Amazon and the others should open themselves up to interoperability as for why it shouldn’t, except that adding that capability is not as simple as saying, “Fine, make it so.” It would take a great deal of time and a lot of money to add interoperability to their existing software and devices—and if it’s not even something most people would bother using, why should they throw their money away?

Unwanted Interoperability

I suppose all this is my long-winded way of saying that it’s going to be very hard to get e-book vendors to allow their e-book formats to interoperate with other vendors’ devices, because neither the e-book vendors nor the vast majority of their customers want it. Lots of activists sure do, but the activists aren’t Amazon’s customer base, who wouldn’t know what to do with interoperability if they had it.

Barnes & Noble announced it will separate its retail and e-book businesses from its college offering, making it a standalone company. Barnes & Noble Education will be come a separately publicly traded company in August, the company announced this week.

With negative news surrounding B&N over the last couple of years due to its declining business with its store fronts and Nook division, the college segment has been a bright spot for the company seeing gains in revenue.

Currently, B&N is working on a plan to expand its college bookstores to 1,000 units as part of a five-year plan.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the split had been planned since last year, but recent sales data from the holiday season showed a 55 percent drop in Nook revenue. Thus making it a hard sell to investors.

Investors looking to focus on the education side of the business, get a more focused option.

“We have a talented College management team in place, led by CEO Max Roberts, and we will continue to invest and innovate to support the mission of our campus partners, expanding to new colleges and universities, students and faculty and increasing our presence in the growing market for digital educational content and services,” said Michael P. Huseby, Chief Executive Office of Barnes & Noble, Inc., in a release.

Barnes & Noble has introduced another service to lever off its bricks-and-mortar presence into greater ebook market share with the rollout of B&N Sync Up, which offers ebook pairings with a selected series of paperback titles – but for an additional $4.99. “Buy the paperback, get the eBook for $4.99. Keep both or gift either,” explains the B&N site. “Choose from select paperbacks including The Secret Life of Bees, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, A Discovery of Witches, and dozens more — all at your local B&N store. Keep one, share one — great for gift-giving.”

Titles in the program will be marked with a special B&N Sync Up bookmark. “The access code for your eBook is printed on your receipt at checkout, or get it via email,” B&N continues. “If your eBook is a gift, ask your cashier for a gift receipt. Visit BN.com/redeem, log in, and enter your access code to download. This eBook can be read on any NOOK or with the NOOK Reading App, available in your app store.”

Whether readers will see this as particularly compelling remains to be seen. The fixed price, for instance, implies that there is no single publisher relationship involved – so why not just give the companion ebook for free? I’m willing to bet that that would lead to far higher takeup than the $4.99 price point.

Howey’s post is worth reading, but lends itself to easy summarizing. Essentially, Amazon provides a number of added benefits and incentives to writers who publish exclusively via Amazon either temporarily or continually: free giveaway days, or inclusion in e-book subscription services such as the Kindle Owners Lending Library or Kindle Unlimited that pay a fee per checkout, for example. Amazon has allowed some top-selling authors, including Howey, to try the service out temporarily without going exclusive to see how the numbers stack up.

After a couple of months, Howey reports that the readership gains he’s seen from Kindle Unlimited “more than covered the readership I gain from the iBookstore, Nook, and Kobo combined.” He might be earning slightly less money, he writes, but gets considerably more fans out of it.

He spends the rest of the post ruminating on whether it’s better to have more readers at the cost of being exclusive to just one platform. He’s leaning strongly toward yes for himself. He justifies it in part by comparing it to publishing exclusively with one major publishing house. (I’m not so sure that’s the best comparison, given how many big-name authors I know of who write for several publishing houses at once.)

It’s a conundrum, isn’t it? Amazon is already such an 800 lb gorilla of the e-book industry that naturally any incentives it can offer will be magnified by the network effect inherent in the huge number of people that use the system. Even a 5% bump in Amazon readers could provide more eyeballs than a 50% bump in readers from a smaller service. And if Howey might be giving up some money in the short term by going exclusive, he’s considerably growing the pool of readers who might be inclined to buy more of his books in the future.

It might surprise some folks, but for all that I boisterously take Amazon’s side in the disputes against Apple and the publishers, I’m not sure that I’m entirely comfortable myself with how dominant Amazon is in the marketplace. They’re playing very nice with consumers and independent authors right now, but there’s no guarantee that will always be the case. (It’s not even clear that Amazon necessarily will be able to continue offering consumers and authors such good deals into the future; investment analysts can’t seem to agree on whether Amazon is hiding the fact that it’s screwed or an unstoppable juggernaut.) And even if other competitors can spring up should Amazon fall down, that still leaves a period of turmoil that could harm consumers, authors, and everyone else.

I’d love to see some decent competitors to Amazon spring up, but at the moment, nobody really seems to be even trying to compete. Apple locks its books into one specific platform—and what’s more, it even requires writers to use that platform only if they want to upload their books directly rather than via an intermediary!

(Seriously, only writers who own a Mac can publish through Apple? These are the people who honestly expected their new e-book platform to rule the world if Amazon could no longer compete with them on price? And iOS isn’t even the top mobile platform anymore, which means they’re excluding the majority of potential readers from buying their e-books!)

Sony’s thrown in the towel. Barnes & Noble’s just taken a major step backward in consumer-friendliness. Kobo…well, the most I can say about Kobo is that I haven’t heard about them doing anything overtly stupid lately, but I haven’t heard about them doing anything especially smart lately either.

Amazon lets you download its e-books directly. It lets authors choose whether they want DRM on their books, unlike some other stores that require it, so many books purchased from Amazon can be converted into other formats and read on other readers without having to crack DRM. And it makes it easy for even the technologically-challenged to buy those books from whatever platform they’re using. You can hate Amazon for its success, or for the way it plays hardball in its negotiations, but you can’t deny that it effectively created the modern e-book market practically from scratch just by being so big and so willing to sell cheaply. And it offers the best deal to authors and readers alike, even if its concentration of power is rightfully a cause for concern.

So, if Amazon is capable of getting Howey significantly more readers—something practically every author wants—why shouldn’t he go exclusively with them? What concrete benefit is there to him from foregoing the benefits Amazon wants to offer in return for putting his books into other stores with anemic readerships and lack of customer focus?

The only answer I can come up with is to try to keep limits on Amazon’s power by supporting its competition. But is that really Howey’s job? Why should he be obligated to support a bunch of lackluster companies who don’t even seem to be interested in trying to compete themselves—and at least in Barnes & Noble’s case seem determined to alienate what few long-term customers they have?

It’s no longer possible to download a book directly from the B&N web site to your hard drive by saving it from your B&N e-book library through your browser. And that includes any previously-purchased e-books you might have imported over from your Fictionwise or eReader library.

We’re sorry, but the ability to sideload NOOK purchased content has been discontinued. We apologize for any inconvenience

There’s a workaround, at least for people on Windows. If you run the Nook app for Windows, you can download e-books from your library to your “My Documents/My Barnes & Noble eBooks” directory. They’ll still have B&N’s DRM on them, but there’s an easy fix for that. Of course, B&N could always disable the ability to download to that app, too—and I’ve heard that said app isn’t necessarily officially supported anymore and can be problematic for people with large libraries. I’m just glad I’ve already backed up all my B&N e-books.

Nate doesn’t draw the link in his article, but for myself, I wonder if there’s a connection to the announcement a few days ago that HarperCollins is going to start digitally watermarking its e-books in addition to protecting them with DRM, in order to be able to tell where any piracy leaks occur. Given that the efficacy of any and every extant e-book DRM is, not to put too fine a point on it, a complete joke, if someone can download a B&N e-book, they can also easily crack it.

So maybe that’s why B&N has decided it doesn’t want people to be able to download its e-books anymore—they should read them within its own apps and nobody else’s. Of course, even if that’s the case, people will still figure out workarounds, so I’m not sure how this is going to do B&N any good.

It’s especially sad this is happening right now, right when Amazon is on everybody’s hit list and people are looking for alternative book and e-book sources. In contrast to Amazon’s proprietary format, B&N’s use of standard ADEPT DRM meant that you could read its DRMed books on any reader app that supported ADEPT, even if it wasn’t B&N’s. If you thought Aldiko was a better Android e-reader, you could go for it. Well, not anymore. (Though you can still download directly from Amazon!)

Will there be sufficient outcry to convince B&N to change their minds? Might there be a government investigation? Will most consumers even notice or care?

Barnes & Noble just seems bound and determined to slide ever further into irrelevance. What a pity.

A widely quoted report in the New York Times details a partnership between Barnes & Noble and Google to create a same-day book delivery service utilizing Google Shopping Express. According to the report, “book buyers in Manhattan, West Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area will be able to get same-day deliveries from local Barnes & Noble stores through Google Shopping Express.” Barnes & Noble is already up on the icon panel of Google Shopping Express partners.

With the Amazon/Hachette spat still unresolved, the NYT unsurprisingly chooses to put an anti-Amazon spin on this news, claiming that “Amazon poses a persistent and growing threat to Google and Barnes & Noble.” B&N, fine, but Google? I don’t see how Amazon is moving into the realms of search. Facebook might be conceivably more of a rival in certain of Google’s key business areas, but Amazon? Yes, they might be a threat to Google’s ambitions to move into their territory, though Google Books and now Google Shopping Express – but vice versa? After all, neither the Fire OS or the Amazon Fire Phone, or even the Firefly contextual search feature, appear to have exactly – ahem – set the world on fire, so Google’s role as custodian of the world’s biggest mobile platform appears in no imminent danger.

And yes, the NYT claims, “Amazon’s popularity as an online shopping destination has the potential to undercut Google’s lucrative search engine advertising business” – but how likely is that potential to be realized? By definition, advertisers on Amazon are already going to be shopping and browsing there, so many of their purchase-focused searches are likely to stay within Amazon itself already. I doubt Google is losing too much business from that. Remember this is also the Amazon that analysts are drubbing for its latest financial figures, indicating that its reinvestment pool is likely to be challenged in future, which hardly sounds like a very solid base to build a major challenge to Google from.

So Amazon doesn’t seem likely to figure high on Google’s hit list. What about B&N’s priorities though? Yes, as Michael P. Huseby, B&N CEO, says in the NYT article, this partnership is “our attempt to link the digital and physical.” But B&N’s efforts in the digital space already seem to have misfired when they jettisoned Nook. Extra outreach to customers through same-day delivery and Google Shopping Express’s additional audience seems a good idea, but the pilot launch covers a pretty small area, and comes late in the day. I’d watch this development with interest, but I won’t hold my breath waiting to see Amazon tremble.

Barnes & Noble Inc. said it would pursue a split of its retail and Nook e-reader businesses into two separate public companies, the next chapter in its bid to shore up its foundering business as readers’ book-buying habits evolve.

The bookseller said it plans to complete the separation by the end of the first quarter of the next calendar year.

This hardly comes as a surprise. If you’ve been following B&N news at all, you’ve seen that they’ve had several bad years in a row, and it hasn’t been getting better. Both segments are in trouble, but the Nook segment is falling faster than the retail segment (-19% sales for Nook, -1.9% retail, in the last quarter, according to the article).

I’ve written frequently about Barnes & Noble and their troubles, including my own issues with Nook books. While I understand their desire to shed hardware development costs, I’m not convinced the new partnership with Samsung is going to help the Nook brand. Check out this comment on the Engadget article I linked to. It’s telling.

I know. I recently said that the typical consumer doesn’t check device specs. But they do check prices, and they do notice screens. I don’t think only tech people will notice the smaller device with worse screen and less memory for the same price. Not to mention if they do any kind of comparison to a Kindle Fire HD, which is the same size, same screen, same memory and only $139.

I’d like to hope this isn’t the beginning of the end, but without some real new development on the Nook line and without the retail side to (sort of) prop them up, I’m afraid we’ll see no more Nooks in the next year or two. Unless it’s sold pretty much exclusively through Samsung.

]]>http://www.teleread.com/barnes-noble/barnes-noble-split-nook-division/feed/1Authors lost the book war long before Amazon vs. Hachettehttp://www.teleread.com/ebooks/authors-lost-the-book-war-long-before-amazon-vs-hachette/
http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/authors-lost-the-book-war-long-before-amazon-vs-hachette/#commentsThu, 19 Jun 2014 16:28:12 +0000http://www.teleread.com/?p=114763

In this article, J.E. Fishman traces authorial woes all the way back to the 1930s when Penguin began to flood the market with cheap paperbacks. This kicked off a paperback revolution among US publishers.

Through all of this disruption no one asked authors what they thought. When it came to business, authors were there to be read and not heard—at least not on the subject of business. Many authors probably stood appalled, but others jumped in and wrote pulp fiction until their fingers bled. Some of these authors went on to become major brands. Go figure.

Then it jumps ahead to the 1980s to touch on German firm’s Bertelsmann’s purchase of Doubleday, and changes to Doubleday’s business model. Most people today probably don’t realize publishers used to be vertically integrated, with a direct sales path to at least some consumers, but prior to 1990, Doubleday had a chain of 39 bookstores, “including a flagship store on Fifth Avenue.” But Bertelsmann sold them all to Barnes & Noble—four years before Amazon ever entered the scene. Then it got rid of its book clubs.

Nobody asked authors whether this last vestige of Doubleday’s vertical integration ought to be abandoned. Authors were expected to go on writing for the good of the culture and let the business people worry about strategy.

Meanwhile, Time bought Little, Brown and Company in 1968, then Warner merged with Time in 1989, then they sold the book business to French conglomerate Hachette in 2006. Meanwhile, the German von Holtzbrinck Group bought a bunch of publishers and turned them into Macmillan, Australian press baron Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp owns HarperCollins, Penguin merged with Random House, and of course there’s CBS’s ownership of Simon & Schuster (at least for now).

Touching on the agency pricing anti-trust case, when five of the Big Six got together with Apple to try to fix e-book prices, Fishman notes it didn’t turn out well for the publishers in the end, “but really, who can blame them for thinking they could collude on book prices when the royalties on nearly every author contract that comes from New York look exactly the same?” Ouch, burrrrn.

In conclusion, Fishman writes sarcastically, nobody cares what authors think about all this. Merely writing books does not qualify them to have an opinion about the future of the book business. “So just shut up and be grateful for your 25 percent of nothing and get back to writing.” Burrrrn again. Better get some aloe vera for that, publishers.

Despite whatever people may be reading into my piece, I don’t see Big Pub as all bad or Amazon as all good, by any means. I think it takes a great deal of moral fiber not to use all the leverage one has against a weaker player. Big companies driven by quarterly earnings inevitably fail this test. There’s great irony, of course, in their screwing over weaker players one day and complaining the next that they’re getting screwed over by someone who’s stronger. Especially because Big Pub was happy to cash the checks from Amazon (and continues to be), when times were good.

You can’t dictate terms that disadvantage authors one day and claim to be a defender of the culture the next day. Rather, you can make that claim if you so choose, but at that point you’re building the castle on sand.

All but a few authors have very little leverage against anybody, despite the fact that we are the ONE truly essential element of the book business. Until, that is, someone teaches a computer to do what we do. Then it’s game over.

So yeah, big corporations do what they do for the benefit of big corporations only, and any benefits that come out of that for authors or readers are basically collateral that we should be grateful for. At the moment, the big corporation that seems to be doing the most for authors and readers is Amazon, whereas the big publishers just want to fleece readers and then not pay authors very much. Maybe someday that will change. But until it does, it seems odd to insist that authors should continue to worship at the idols of the ones trying to charge higher prices, sell fewer copies of their books, and pay them lower royalties.

Well, here’s another Salon Amazon hit piece, at least sort of. Salon chose to headline it, “Neil Gaiman: ‘I’m obviously pissed at Amazon’” but if you read the actual article, you find the quote was taken out of context. Gaiman feels that the anti-trust prosecution against the five major publishers and Apple was a bad move, but on the matter of Amazon versus Hachette, he is actually ambivalent:

I’m a weird mixture right now, because on the one hand, I’m obviously pissed at Amazon. I’m a Hachette author in the U.K., my wife is a Hachette author now, and I’m very aware that Hachette is the first of these publishers that negotiations are going to happen with, and that HarperCollins [Gaiman’s U.S. publisher] will be coming up in six months’ time or whatever. On the other hand, I’m just as aware that what you’re seeing right now, is huge, giant-level dealings between huge corporations both under non-disclosure, and every time I try to actually read enough stuff to figure out what’s going on here, what I run into is lots of “We can’t say anything, but he says,” and “We can’t say anything, but she says.”

There was a thing I read yesterday where somebody, apparently from Amazon, speaking off the record, was saying why this whole three-to-five week delivery [delay] thing was happening with Hachette Books was that Hachette was playing hardball and they weren’t delivering the books to Amazon. Was that true? I don’t know. I have no idea.

What is obviously problematic is that Amazon has, whatever it is, 30 to 40 percent of the book market. Which is not a good thing. The point, I think, where I would go incandescent is if Amazon ever repeats the number it pulled, I think a few years ago, with the Macmillan books — which is basically saying, we are not selling you this book. At that point, they’re doing the equivalent of what Barnes and Noble did a couple years ago to me, when they were arguing that they were having one of these, again, corporation-to-corporation arguments with DC Comics, and they said, “Well, the Sandman books aren’t for sale, you can no longer buy them at Barnes and Noble.” And I was fuming.

The odd thing here is that, even after Barnes & Noble did the exact same thing to him, he’s still inclined to be angry specifically at Amazon for it rather than realizing that this is something endemic to the way that big bookstore chains work in general when it comes time to renegotiate contracts. The B&N dispute with Simon & Schuster last year is another example.

Later on in the piece, he lectures an imagined Jeff Bezos that books are special snowflakes, and that dealing in books is “treading on sacred ground.” The funny thing to me is that this is the exact argument that industry after industry—including Apple in the recent trial under Judge Kote—has made to explain why it should be exempt from anti-trust laws. The courts have universally been unimpressed. You don’t get to gang up on a retailer who’s doing something you don’t like just because it’s about something “special,” and I’m pretty sure the appeals will bear me out in that.

Gaiman concludes that the dispute is “terribly bad for authors’ rights now,” though of course I’m sure folks like J.A. Konrath or Hugh Howey would argue with him on that score. Independent authors are, after all, having the time of their lives.

Late last month, I was having trouble with my Nook pre-order of Skin Game (the new Dresden Files book), and I discovered, mostly by accident, that you could open Nook Books in Adobe Digital Editions.

My pre-order downloaded fine to my Nook, but it was corrupted on Nook for PC. I went to the website, mostly thinking it would be in vain, and I saw a Download button. I figured I’d see what would happen.

It downloaded as a normal-looking .epub, and I double-clicked on it, thinking it would open in Nook for PC. Instead, it opened in Aobe Digital Editions. The program asked for my unlock information (user name and credit card number). I entered them, and the book opened!

Why would you want to, you may ask? Well, I’ve never been a fan of Nook for PC, and the version that’s compatible with Windows 7 hasn’t been updated since 2011. Adobe Digital Editions, while not my favorite way to read, is, in my opinion, a better option for computer reading. If you want to strip DRM from your Nook books, this means you can completely bypass Nook for PC and just use Adobe Digital Editions.

Two different op-eds have popped up on CNN and Al Jazeera suggesting that Amazon, big bully that it is in the Hachette negotiation, needs to be taken down a peg under the Robinson-Patman Act. (If you didn’t hear a raspy voice say “I’m Patman” when I mentioned the name of that law, I’m pretty sure you did just now.)

Robinson-Patman is an anti-predatory-pricing regulation that’s on the books dating back to the ‘30s, intended to prevent businesses from charging different prices in different towns to undercut local competition, or from using their size to bully suppliers into giving them better deals than they give smaller companies. Sound familiar? The editorialists (whose views, it should be noted, do not represent CNN or Al Jazeera) seem to think so.

Writer Onnesha Roychoudhuri writes in Al Jazeera:

The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice used to measure competition in diversity of retailers as well as low prices. The Robinson-Patman Act — on the books since the 1930s — made it illegal for a company to charge different prices in different towns in order to undersell local stores. With good reason: It’s a strategy that breeds monopolies, allowing a big company to come in, eliminate competitors by underselling them and then charge whatever it wants to a newly captive consumer audience. While the Robinson-Patman Act still exists, as evidenced by the metastasizing of Wal-Mart stores over the years, the FTC and DOJ don’t enforce it. “They’ve almost completely backed away,” former FTC lawyer John Kirkwood told me, pointing out that courts now view such cases as anti-consumer. In other words, opinion has shifted to a near fundamentalist faith in the idea that low prices are all that matter.

Lina Khan, policy analyst at the New America Foundation, adds in the CNN piece:

"If the government still enforced Robinson-Patman, it would go a fair way towards limiting the power of Amazon," said Oren Teicher, CEO of the American Booksellers Association, which represents independent bookstores. He would know: In the 1990s, ABA brought numerous cases against both publishers and chain stores for violating Robinson-Patman.

Not a lawyer or anything, but there are a couple of problems I see here.

First of all, economy of scale is a defense to Robinson-Patman Act charges. Volume discounts are explicitly declared all right. The FTC’s Q&A page on the Act puts it thus:

Q: I operate two stores that sell compact discs. My business is being ruined by giant discount chains that sell their products for less than my wholesale cost. What can I do?

A: Discount chains may be able to buy compact discs at a lower wholesale price because it costs the manufacturer less, on a per-unit basis, to deal with large-volume customers. If so, the manufacturer may have a "cost justification" defense to the differential pricing and the policy would not violate the Robinson-Patman Act.

And I ask you: who moves more volume than Amazon?

The second, and perhaps more damning problem actually comes courtesy of Khan herself, who points out that in the ‘90s the ABA successfully filed suit against big publishers for offering the big chain stores secret discounts, and Barnes & Noble and Borders for pressuring the publishers into providing those discounts. The ABA didn’t wait around for the government to get involved—it went out there and smacked those price discriminators upside the head with a lawyer-powered cosh. It won victories in court, including a $25 million judgment from Penguin and various consent decree settlements from other publishers.

Where’s the private lawsuit now? Did Ms. Khan ask the ABA why it hasn’t gone after Amazon yet, like it went after the publishers, Barnes & Noble, and Borders, rather than standing around wishing the government would? (Could it be they recognize Amazon is actually helping independent bookstores by weakening Barnes & Noble?)

[Update: While I was researching another story, I ran across something I’d forgotten about on The Digital Reader. It turns out that, last year, three booksellers did file an anti-trust lawsuit against Amazon. In December, it was thrown out for a lack of any proof behind their “threadbare allegations.” So, all right, there was one anti-trust lawsuit, and it fizzled. Anyone think they can do better?]

For that matter, if they really thought Amazon was doing something illegal, why haven’t the publishers themselves done anything in a lawyerly manner? As Michael W. Perry has pointed out here several times, when Amazon illegally tried to force small publishers to use its CreateSpace (nee BookSurge) print on demand service, BookLocker sued and Amazon backed down and settled. You can’t tell me that the multi-billion-dollar publishing conglomerates can’t afford lawyers at least as good as a small press’s!

(But no, no legal action for the Big Six publishers, even when they were just positive Amazon was practicing predatory pricing. They took some of the good old-fashioned illegal kind, instead. Why do you suppose they’d rather break the law than use it if it was so readily in their favor? Sort of makes you wonder, doesn’t it?)

You can’t point out that a private group sued successfully in the ‘90s and then use that as your basis to complain the government isn’t suing now. It’s a non sequitur. It doesn’t follow. If these private groups were so rah-rah over Robinson-Patman in the ‘90s, well, let’s see them prove they’re not all talk. Let them put their money where their mouth is and do it again. I’ll be waiting.

There’s a theme in the triad of Amazon/Hachette articles I found this morning, and the theme is…competition.

First of all, here’s a rare op ed in favor of Amazon that originally appeared in CNN’s “Fortune” section. (Though it seems to have vanished from there; the link no longer works and the author reposted it on his own blog.) Len Sherman rebuts an earlier anti-Amazon piece by Adam Lashinsky and argues that Hachette’s background as an illegal colluder suggests it is more interested in keeping prices high, whereas Amazon wants to keep them lower for consumers.

Turning Lashinsky’s argument around, I’m trying to understand what strange universe he lives in to believe that consumers won’t come out ahead if Amazon wins this fight. Lashinsky may be conflating author interest with consumer interest, and I can understand his disappointment in being collateral damage in this fight. But as he notes, consumers have alternative choices to buy his book (as I already have). After the dust settles, if Amazon wins, he will wind up selling morebooks at lower retail prices and probably earn higher royalty payments.

I think Lashinsky should redirect some of his wrath on Hachette, who, like other major publishers, pays only a 25% royalty rate on e=book sales, compared to 50% from native e-publishers like Open Road Media or 50%-70% from Amazon (depending on ebook price).

Next up is David Gaughran (found via The Passive Voice), who discusses the “discoverability” problem in publishing. For years now, publishers have been complaining that the shift in book sales to the Internet has made it harder for readers to “discover” new works. However, most readers Gaughran spoke to didn’t have any problem finding more books they wanted to read than they had time to read—especially given the explosion in self-published works lately.

Gaughran posits:

Large publishers have proved adept in one area: getting their message out. Sometimes it feels like they spend more on corporate PR than breaking new authors, and you need a bullshit dictionary to parse their statements.

So when large publishers say that the discoverability puzzle hasn’t been solved online, they are really expressing despair at retailers recommending books not published by them.

And when large publishers say that online retailers haven’t matched the experience of buying in physical stores, they mean that they wish there was some way to relegate all that stuff from small publishers and self-publishers to the warehouse, and have tables piled high with James Patterson and Snooki.

In a perfect world (okay, in my perfect world) there would be a separate section on Amazon or B&N.com for self-published e-books, maybe even separate websites. I truly believe that it would help the reader distinguish the books as well. Readers don’t purchase books based on who the publisher is and don’t necessarily care. As a result, they might not even know if they’re buying a book that was professionally edited versus one that was self-published. Publishers are devaluing their own content as well by even adding to the confusion. All publishers will discount the first title in a series, and these get mixed in with the other less expensive books and just add to the clutter.

Gaughran blames the failure of Bookish, the supposedly “completely independent and autonomous” book recommendation site (that nonetheless managed to recommend only books from the Big Three publishers who backed it), on this mentality. (Of course, that spectacular failure hasn’t stopped its erstwhile CEO, Ardy Khazaei, from being quoted and probably highly paid as a publishing-industry “consultant,” another great sign of just how far the industry has its head up its own butt.)

Conversely, Amazon hasn’t tried to make its Goodreads subsidiary favor only books it sells, it stocks products from its own competitors, and it even welcomes bad reviews of products against all conventional wisdom. Nor has it tweaked its recommendation algorithms to push its own products ahead of anyone else’s.

So, Gaughran posits, the real reason publishers hate Amazon is that for the first time they’re actually facing real competition from Amazon in publishing, and from those self-published authors in market share.

And expanding upon that theme is the last article in our trifecta, by self-pub celebrity Hugh Howey. Like the publishers, Howey wants to talk monopoly, though in this case he starts out with an analogy to the board game of that name, discussing the cutthroat tactics used by a past employer who liked to play the other players against each other. The publishers, Howey posits, are playing the book industry game the same way.

I am told, without exaggeration and in all seriousness, that Amazon wants to “crush their competition.” I hear that they want to “put everyone else out of business.” Two things are true, both of which make these statements ridiculous: The first is that Amazon most certainly doesn’t want all of their competitors to go out of business, because then they’d be the only game in town and the government would have no choice but to break them up. The second is that of course they are acting as if they want to put their competitors out of business. That’s how you improve your business practices. You try to out-do your competition.

Unless . . . you don’t understand at all what it means to compete. Which I think explains the righteous indignation. But I’ll get to that in a minute.

The thing about Amazon, Howey says, is that it actually set out to disrupt itself. It made its name as the place to sell physical books on the Internet—but it saw that it could become the place to sell e-books on the Internet, too. (Much like Apple did, and much like Eastman Kodak didn’t.) Customers loved it, while publishers vilified it. Meanwhile, chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders, who used to be the big villains for knocking out indie bookstores, have been suffering in competition with Amazon, causing a minor renaissance for indie bookstores who can outcompete the chains on personality every time.

At the same time, the big publishers grow ever bigger—most recently with the merger of Penguin and Random House, who combined now account for half the total revenue of the Big Five put together in just one company. And those publishers have a history of not really competing with one another even when they weren’t outright illegally colluding.

Their contracts are functionally identical. Their e-book royalties (and most others terms and clauses) are lockstep and are not negotiable. They have a history of working together in a noncompetitive fashion in order to raise prices for their customers (prices that they would love to set at twice what mass market paperbacks formerly cost). Conferring by phone or email in this culture is considered polite, not illegal. It wasn’t long ago that top editors at the major houses would meet on Wednesdays to discuss the bestseller list, to congratulate one another on acquisitions, and to discuss business plans and practices. All completely normal. Celebrated, even.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch discussed this back in November—it used to be a common thing for the publishers to get together and agree to stagger release dates for their major books so they could all have a little time in the best-seller list limelight. Since the increased scrutiny resulting from the anti-trust trial, they haven’t dared to resume this practice.

Howey brings up the example of Simon & Schuster innovating with print-only publishing deals and getting slapped down by all the other publishers. He also mentions “most-favored-nation clauses”—not the ones that enforced agency pricing, but the ones in book contracts that require publishers to raise royalty rates for certain specific authors if they dare to raise them for one.

Unable to tolerate a move toward democratic literature, where any voice is free to publish, where authors are paid 70% of list price instead of a mere 17.5%, they rely instead on appeals to litigation, on a public relations campaign within the press, and on collusion.

As David Gaughran said, the publishers really don’t like watching their market share dwindle as customers flock to that nasty, trashy self-published competition. And now they’re doing their best to shut Amazon down, blacklisting Amazon-published works from brick and mortar stores and rallying their authors and anyone they can get to regurgitate their propaganda. Howey wonders why these people are so easily fooled:

Why show support for a corporation that may lower royalties to 30% in the future when you can celebrate a corporation that pays 17.5% today? Why show support for a corporation that may raise prices in the future when you can champion a corporation that colludes to raise them today? The groupthink and absence of reason is baffling.

Well, the game goes on; the competition and collusion continue. It feels kind of like we’re at a turning point in history, and in years to come we’ll look back at today as the time when it all changed—or else when it all stayed the same.

Just think what the book and e-book market looked like just eight years ago, before the Kindle, and before Amazon opened the floodgates to e-self-publishing. Oh, sure there were self-published print-on-demand and e-book titles, as people had already discovered how the Internet could be leveraged to sell their own books, but they didn’t have nearly the market share they do today. Now they take up a huge chunk of the overall book market, and every bit of that has been gouged out of the Big Five nee Six publishers’ share. No wonder they’re running scared.

Ever since I got my Nexus 7, my Nook HD has been kind of languishing. I’d upgraded it to the most recent Jelly Bean Cyanogenmod version a while back, but I was curious: what might Kit Kat be like on it? Could I run it? Given that I had the Nexus, I wasn’t in danger of losing my only Android tablet solution if I screwed it up, so I figured, why not break me off a piece?

I found some not terribly user-friendly instructions, puzzled my way through them, and commenced. It worked for me, so I’m going to tell you what I did so it can work for you, too.

The Nook HD really isn’t a bad little Android tablet at all for the money. At 1440×900, it has one of the highest definition screens in its price range (not as good as the 1920×1200 2013 Nexus 7, but better than the 1280×800 screen that the 2012 Nexus 7 and most other $100ish tablets can manage), a decently fast processor, okay memory, Bluetooth, an SD expansion slot that many tablets (including the Nexus 7) lack, and louder speakers than you’d expect. It doesn’t have cameras or internal GPS, but who really uses those that much on a tablet anyway? You can get the 8 GB version for $129 brand new from B&N or the 8 or 16 GB for considerably less than that on eBay, or when they pop up from time to time on deal sites like Woot. And who knows, it might get even cheaper yet if B&N goes out of business like it’s been threatening to.

If you put a real OS on it, so it’s not tied so heavily to the B&N ecosystem, it could make a great little portable computing machine for you. It would also be an excellent “beater” tablet to give the kiddies instead of blowing three or four times as much on a “real” one or the same amount on a cheap crappy Chinese thing that will just frustrate them when they try to use it.

And I’m going to show you how.

Warning: Doing this could brick your tablet. It’s possible you could screw up badly enough that your tablet won’t work anymore—or at the least, completely erase the operating system on board it and have to reinstall a new one from SD card. Don’t blame me if you break it. I disclaim any responsibility for your decision.

If you’re not sure you’re geeky enough to do it after reading these instructions, you could do what Juli Monroe did and buy a KitKat N2A card instead. She reported a few problems with the way the HD ran afterward, but it could just have been due to the earlier Kit Kat build N2A used. Presumably they’ve switched to a later one by now. I haven’t had that kind of problems with my more recent version, that I’ve noticed.

Warning: Doing this will void your warranty. If you keep a backup of the original OS, it’s possible you could just restore from that before you send it in and nobody would know the difference, but on the other hand if the tablet breaks in such a way that you can’t do that, you’re out of luck. Of course, if you buy one of the ones from eBay that don’t come with a warranty, that probably doesn’t matter to you anyway.

Warning: This will erase all the contents of your tablet. I’m going to go over backing it up first so you can, theoretically, restore the original version if you want. And of course if you purchased any apps or media from the Google Play store you can just redownload them afterward. (You will lose access to any apps you bought from the B&N app store, because they can’t be installed on non-B&N devices) But this is going to wipe the tablet clean and get rid of the old OS for good. (I understand that you can use the N2A card to dual-boot between Nook OS and Cyanogenmod, but I couldn’t care less about keeping Nook OS.)

Warning: Don’t mix up the Nook HD and Nook HD+. They’re two different tablets that use entirely different Android builds. The one called “hummingbird” is for the HD. The one called “ovation” is for the HD+. Apart from that, the installation process is basically the same, but since I only have an HD, not an HD+, I’m not even going to try to tell you how to do the HD+. Here’s one of those less-user-friendly guides that goes into it; you can use their files and my steps if you want to try it.

What You Will Need

Hardware

The first thing you’ll need is, of course, a Nook HD. (Duh!)

Beyond that, you will also need a 4 GB-or-greater micro SD card. Any of these will probably work. You might want to go with at least an 8 GB, especially if you can get it cheaper than the 4 GB, because it’ll give you extra space for saving backups. Not all SD cards will necessarily work, but I’ve had good success with my SanDisk brand 4 GB card.

If you’ve been using your tablet for a while and have installed a lot of apps and media, you might need one even bigger than that. After all, when you back the tablet up, you’re going to back up anything it currently has in its memory. That could be up to 8 GB for the 8 GB version, or 16 GB if it’s 16. SD cards are cheap, and the Nook HD supports up to 64 GB SDXC cards. So if in doubt, get a bigger one.

And finally, you will need a micro-SD card adapter that you can plug into a USB slot. Or a micro-SD-to-standard-SD adapter that you plug into the SD card slot on your laptop. Either way works, as long as your computer is capable of mounting the SD card as an external disk drive.

Software

Download these files to some directory on your hard drive where you can easily find them. I made a “Cyanogenmod Stuff” directory under my Program Files, but you could put it in Documents, or your Dropbox folder, or wherever.

Like a Linux boot ISO file that you burn onto a CD-ROM, this is the image of a bootable SD card that will boot your Nook into installation and recovery mode just like a Linux boot disc will boot your computer into Linux. You also need software that can unzip a gzip file if you don’t already have some; 7-Zip is a good one.

This is what you’ll use to burn the boot image onto the SD card. This assumes you’re on Windows, of course. If you’re using a Mac, you can use this one instead. You’ll have to find some other app if you’re using another OS. I gather you can use “dd” if you’re running Linux, but you’ll have to figure out how to do that for yourself.

This is the package that installs the recovery boot system in your Nook HD, so that if something goes wrong you can boot to recovery without needing the boot SD card by holding down the “N” button and the power button when you start up.

This link will take you to the Cyanogenmod download page for all extant versions of Cyanogenmod for hummingbird (Nook HD). The 10.1 Cyanogenmod is 4.2 Jelly Bean; 10.2 is 4.3. You want Kit Kat, Android 4.4, which is Cyanogenmod 11.

As to which file Cyanogenmod 11 file you should choose, if you want the most stable version choose one of the SNAPSHOT downloads, with the highest “M” number available. For example, the latest SNAPSHOT available as this guide is being written is “cm-11-20140504-SNAPSHOT-M6-hummingbird.zip”. It might be up to M8 or M10 or later by the time you read this. These are the “stable” milestone releases of Cyanogenmod 11, though the Cyanogenmod people don’t call them “stable” because they’ve apparently decided that terms like “release candidate” and “stable” are too limiting. Well, whatever.

Alternately, you could go with the latest nightly build. There have been enough stable releases of Cyanogenmod that they’ve gotten most of the glitches out by now, and with only four weeks between milestone releases, there’s not too much they could have broken since the last one. If you go with a nightly, your file will be named something like “cm-11-20140522-NIGHTLY-hummingbird.zip” (with, of course, whatever date it came out in place of that one). If it doesn’t work right, you could always download the latest SNAPSHOT and install that instead. You will probably want to repeat this process every so often, upgrading to newer hummingbird packages as they become available.

Of course, even the “stable” SNAPSHOT builds are only relatively stable, given that the Kit Kat Cyanogenmod port is still under active development. (And as an older device, the Nook HD sometimes gets short shrift on the latest dev builds.) Sooner or later, you’ll probably run into a build that is very crash-prone. If that happens, back off to a prior nightly or SNAPSHOT; you can always upgrade back to a newer one when it’s available.

If you don’t want to live that dangerously, you can check out this guide to installing the most recent version of Jelly Bean, which is in its final stable release and no longer under development. The steps are basically the same, but it uses different OS image and Google Apps package files than the ones I link to here. But again, the latest Kit Kat nightly is working fine for me.

Otherwise known as “gapps” (for “Google Apps”), this package includes Google’s App Store, plus the suite of built-in Google apps that form the core of the Android experience. As with the OS image, you’ll have a choice to make here. There are several different versions of the package, of various different sizes, including different combinations of the apps.

I personally went with the “Mini Modular Package,” which includes the core Google stuff but doesn’t include extra things like the Camera app that you won’t need anyway (because, duh, you haven’t got a camera!). And it’s small enough that the extra cruft doesn’t take up much space. Of course, there’s no reason you couldn’t go with the “Micro Modular Package” instead if you didn’t want even all of those apps. Any app except the Play Store itself can, of course, be installed later from the Play Store if you do decide you want it.

If you’re installing Kit Kat, you want the ones for Android 4.4, at the beginning of the section. If you decided to play it safe and go with Jelly Bean, scroll to the bottom of the first post and click the button to view the 4.3 gapps packages. Don’t get the two mixed up.

Once you’ve got all of those in a directory on your hard drive, we can begin.

Cyanogenmodding Your Nook HD: Step By Step

Part One: Prepare the SD card

Plug the card into your computer via whichever adapter you choose. It should pop up in Explorer as another hard drive.

Unzip the nookhd-emmc-cwm2.1.img.gz file. If you’ve got 7-Zip installed, you can just right-click the file, mouse over “7-Zip” in the context menu, and choose “Extract here.” Note: You do not need to unzip any of the other files besides the Win32DiskImager and the img.gz. Leave the other zips just as they are.

Unzip Win32DiskImager into its own directory. There’s no installer; it just runs from the Win32DiskImager.exe file.

Go into the Win32DiskImager directory and run the .exe file. It will pop up a security warning asking you if you’re sure you want to allow this program to make modifications to your system; tell it yes.

Make sure the drive letter of your SD card is selected in the drop-down in the upper right, Click the blue folder icon next to it, navigate to where you have the unzipped .img file, and choose that file. Then click the “Write” button, tell it you’re sure if it asks, and wait a few minutes while it does its work. Warning: This will completely erase any existing contents of the SD card. Copy off anything you want to keep first.

Wait for the program to finish writing, and once you get the pop-up telling you it’s done, you can exit the program.

Copy the other three zip files—the cwm-recovery, cm-11, and pa_gapps zips—onto the SD card. The easiest way is to select them all then right-click and choose “Send to” and select the drive letter of your SD card. Or you can drag and drop.

Use the USB symbol icon to “safely eject” the SD card, or right-click on the drive letter from an explorer window and choose “eject”. Remember not to remove the card until the computer says it’s safe!

Note that if you’re on some other OS than Windows, you should replace steps 3, 4, and 5 with whatever procedure is necessary to run the image-burning software you’re using for your platform. But you probably guessed that already.

Part Two: Booting the Tablet

Here comes the fun part.

Power down the Nook HD tablet.

Use your fingernail to pry open the SD card slot cover, at the bottom left of the tablet. Insert the SD card, label side up, and use your fingernail to push it in until it clicks into place. Close the lid.

Power on the tablet, by holding down the power button at the upper left for a few seconds. You should get a screen that says “cyanoboot universal bootloader,” then a few seconds later the text menu shown at right.

If it didn’t boot, it’s possible you might need to perform the steps in Part One on another SD card (some of them just don’t work for some reason), or try this alternate method of making a card.

To navigate this menu, you’ll use the volume buttons on the right to move up and down, the “n” hardware button at middle front to select, and the power button on the left to go back.

The first thing you should do is go to “backup and restore” and hit the “n” button. From this menu, choose “backup to /external_sd”—it’s about halfway down. Note: Do not choose “backup to /sdcard”. For some counterintuitive reason, this version of Android calls the internal memory “/sdcard” and the external memory “/external_sd”. Since we want to back up to the external SD, that is what we need to choose.

Wait for the backup to complete. It will probably take a few minutes.

Next, use the power button at the top left to back out to the main menu and next choose “install zip”. In the “install zip” menu, choose “install zip from /external_sd”.

Install the zips in this order:1) cwm-recovery-hummingbird-5.zip, 2) cm-11-XXXXXXX-hummingbird.zip, 3) pa_gapps-XXXXX-signed.zip. After you install each one, simply repeat the process and choose the next one.

Once it’s finished installing the last of those packages, open the SD card slot lid again and pop out the SD card. Then close the lid again.

Use the power button to back out to the top menu, choose “reboot system now,” and press the “n” button.

Assuming all went well, it will boot up, take a few minutes to complete the OS upgrade, and then boot into Kit Kat. Well done, you!

If it asks you which launcher you want to use, I’d recommend going with Trebuchet, the Cyanogenmod built-in launcher. You can always swap to Google Now by running it from the app screen, or change which one you want to use as the default in the Settings app. Or you can download more new and exciting launchers from the Play Store if neither of those takes your fancy.

Part Three: After the Boot

Before you enjoy your newly Kit Katted out Nook HD, there are a couple of things we want to do first.

Plug the SD card back into the computer again, and open it in explorer. You’ll find a new folder on the card: “clockworkmod/”. This contains your backup. Go ahead and copy it to your HD, zip it, and stick it somewhere safe. Perhaps in the same directory as all those files I had you download for upgrading. Once that’s done, you can delete it from the SD card. You can repeat the process later on if you want to back it up again. It’s probably a good idea to do it every so often.

Eject the card and put it in a safe place. If you should ever need to reinstall Cyanogenmod for any reason, it could be useful to have. Likewise, if they release a later version of Kit Kat (a RC or Stable) and you’d like to upgrade, all you will need to do is copy the new cm-11 zip file onto the card, boot from it, and install it just like you did this time. (You won’t need to reinstall the recovery or apps.) (Or you can use the internal upgrade feature in Android to do it, but sometimes you might not have enough space in internal memory to hold the upgrade file.)

Enjoy Kit Kat on your Nook HD!

Optional Extra: Installing the Nook Reader

If you’ve been using your Nook HD as a “stock” Nook device for a while, you’ve probably bought some e-books from B&N. And since you’ve been a good little boy or girl and haven’t cracked the DRM on them so you could read them with Moon+ Reader, that means you need the Nook Reader app. (Or you could use Aldiko, since it also supports Adobe DRM, but for the sake of this guide I’m going to assume you’d like to have the Nook Reader running on your Nook tablet.) However, if you try to install it from the Play Store you run into a problem.

One odd little wrinkle about putting plain-vanilla Android on the Nook HD is that, while you can readily install most of the apps from the Google Play app store (including the Kindle app), one that you can’t install is the Nook Reader. It’s not actually incompatible, but the Play Store says it is. (My guess is that B&N didn’t want anyone accidentally installing the Nook Reader app on a stock Nook HD and either overwriting or duplicating the version that was built into its operating system. So when Google Play notices the hardware you’re using is a Nook HD, it says “Nuh-uh.”)

So, to install it, we have to get a little creative.

Go into Settings, and swipe the left menu up until you come to “Security”. Tap “Security” and swipe the right menu up until you find “Unknown sources.” Put a check mark next to “Unknown sources.” It will give you a warning; just tap “OK.”

Fire up the Chrome web browser on your Nook HD and navigate to this page on the 1mobile app store. Tap on “Install” and install the 1mobile app store.

Launch the 1mobile app store, and it will download and install the Nook Reader app.

You’ll want to keep the 1mobile app store around for installing updates to the Nook Reader app, but don’t let it update anything else on your system; it will conflict with the Google Play app store.

I’ve read that some prior versions of the app won’t read books from the external SD card. I’m not sure if that’s still a problem, since I don’t keep any books on external SD cards. Still, you’ve got plenty of room on board to download just those particular e-books you want to read.

The Swiftkey custom keyboard is another “incompatible” app that requires the use of a third-party app store to install. You can also install these apps by downloading their APK file from somewhere, putting it on an SD card, and using a file manager to install the APK file manually, but doing it from a third-party app store is a lot simpler.

Also, if you should decide you’d like to be able to boot your Nook back into stock Nook OS from an SD card, it is apparently possible to do so using similar techniques to the process of preparing the card in Step One above. See this guide for more information.

Conclusion

I hope this guide has helped you, and not bricked your Nook. I hope you enjoy your Nook HD Kit Kat experience!

If you have any questions or concerns, ask them in the comments and I’ll try to address them. Please note that I’m not able to provide in-depth technical support for you, or to help you if you did brick your tablet. Sorry about that.

If you do want more advanced technical help, a good spot to check would be the XDA Developers Nook HD forum, which is where I found the not-terribly-user-friendly guides that I originally used.

That seems to be the chorus that publisher advocates are singing these days: as publishers fight against the evil market-devouring Amazon much as the Transformers fought the evil world-devouring Unicron, the publishers should “dare” to open the Matrix of Leadership and pull all their titles from Amazon. You’ve got a post by Jeremy Greenfield on Digital Book World (found via The Passive Voice) exhorting Hachette to pull its books, issue a public statement saying that they did it because Amazon wouldn’t play ball, and double down with Barnes & Noble, giving them a better deal than they had been in return for extra-special treatment in stores and on the Nook.

It’s possible, perhaps, for Hachette to survive without Amazon. One can imagine Hachette launching its own direct sales, or helping Barnes & Noble or other supercharge the sale of its books. But the “Everything Store” isn’t the “Everything Store” without thousands of titles from a major publishers.

It’s a crazy idea, but it might give Hachette the best chance to surprise and shock Amazon, and ultimately force it to terms Hachette can live with.

And then you’ve got good ol’ Bob Kohn, he of the amicus curae comic book, with an op-ed in the Economic Times of India and the New York Times. After spending most of the article ragging on that mean and nasty ol’ Amazon and the Department of Justice for ganging up on those poor innocent publishers who did absolutely nothing wrong in colluding illegally to raise consumer e-book prices (and entirely skipping over the fact that Apple was found guilty by a court of law for its part in that behavior), Kohn trots out this little gem:

So far, Hachette, to its credit, has been unbending. But Amazon still has its nuclear option. It would appear that unless Amazon backs down – through public pressure or government intervention – publishers will have no choice but to employ their own nuclear option: pull all their books from Amazon and throw their weight behind a law-abiding alternative. Perhaps the best solution would be an online marketplace controlled by the publishers – with the 30 per cent commission being split 50-50 with the authors in addition to the author’s royalty.

If consumers are inconvenienced by the switch, once again they will have only Amazon to blame.

Frankly, I’d love to see them try it, just to watch the fallout. But they won’t. Amazon accounts for 41% of the entire book market. Out of five randomly chosen new books or e-books that were sold online or in stores, two of them will have been sold by Amazon. And it’s more like two out of three for just e-books. If publishers are this concerned about Amazon nibbling away at their margins, do you think they’re going to want to give up that much of their marketplace in one fell swoop?

Granted, they wouldn’t lose all that business. Print books are print books, so at least some consumers would switch to ordering from Barnes & Noble, Books a Million, or even the publishers directly if they were to set up direct e-tail operations. But e-books are a much more complicated matter. As I noted in this piece, consumers are kept locked into Amazon primarily by how darned easy it is to buy books there. Even when the books are DRM-free and cheap on another site, the majority of consumers don’t want the hassle of anything more complicated than tapping a button to make the book magically appear on their Kindle.

Perhaps, as I suggested in that piece, the publishers could “kill” Amazon by pulling all their books from it. Amazon’s network effect would fizzle if it suddenly lost all the Big Five publishers’ titles, and its customers might be induced to switch to a different platform that had that publisher support. (Though it’s also possible that small publishers and self-publishers would have a field day, with big publishers’ books no longer around to compete for sales with theirs.)

But could the Big Five publishers survive long enough to reap the benefits? Their relationship with Amazon is a cross between an addiction and life support. If they try to go cold turkey, they might just flatline—a pyrrhic victory if ever there was one. And even if the publishers were willing to try it, their authors—who would be hit even worse in the pocketbook—would probably revolt. (Likely so would their investors.)

Yet for all that (and despite another commenter following him around like his own personal Greek Chorus to ask him whether he’s pulled his books from Amazon yet whenever he posts another anti-Amazon comment), he continues to sell them via Amazon, rather than pulling his books and asking that people buy them at some other store instead.

Michael W. Perry is like the big publishers in microcosm. He believes Amazon is doing him dirty, but he knows that he’d lose more money in lost sales by pulling his titles from them than he’d gain in gained sales at higher royalty rates from other vendors. because most Amazon customers would just buy other books from Amazon instead of going to other vendors for his. (Or, at least, so I am assuming. I’m sure if I’m wrong he’ll correct me in the comments. If he has a different reason for not pulling his books from Amazon, I’d like to hear it, and I’m sure his Greek Chorus would too.)

It’s the same for the big publishers—especially since their negotiations are staggered, so the effect of losing any one of those publishers’ books won’t be felt as severely by Amazon as losing all five of them at once would be. Indeed, if Hachette only accounts for 1.1% of Amazon’s demand-weighted products as Amazon claims, most consumers might not even notice. And Apple got along just fine without Random House, the biggest of the Big Six publishers (where Hachette is now the smallest), for a whole year.

Anyway, Hachette is taking a stand, but it’s unclear whether they can win, or even if they will dare.

Barron’s has an article by Andrew Bary (paywalled; bypass with Google News) suggesting that Barnes & Noble stock is currently badly underpriced. Trading around $18 right now, Bary argues, B&N could be worth $36 based on the value of the company’s assets alone, especially if B&N follows through on cutting its losses (especially with regard to the Nook) and improving efficiency.

What benefits might accrue to B&N shareholders? Bary suggests B&N could split up into three separate companies—bookstores, college bookstores, and Nook—though given the improvements to Nook’s bottom line, this might be unlikely to happen any time soon. Or it might issue a stock buyback or large dividend, neither of which it is doing right now.

As with any speculative article about the stock market, the key word here is “speculative.” There are an awful lot of tea leaves out there, and the people trying to read them don’t always speak the same language in which they’re written. But it is intriguing that B&N’s stock might be even lower than the value of the company suggests it should be.

If you go by Hollywood notions of the stock market, this is the time for some corporate raider to buy a majority share and break it up for parts. (I’m sure there are plenty of reasons this is unlikely to happen in the real world.) Or it might be a good time for some company who sees a potential synergy from working with B&N to buy a stake. If B&N is primed for a comeback, that will be good news for the Big Five publishers, who seem pretty desperate to have some kind of credible competitor around to keep Amazon honest.

Regardless, I’m not about to rush out and put my money in B&N yet. Nobody’s made a fortune by betting against Amazon so far.

So, more people have chimed in on the Amazon/Hachette thing. Most notably, Charlie Stross has blogged about it. Given that he’s published by Orbit, a subsidiary of Hachette, it’s understandable that his point of view is rather similar to Lilith Saintcrow’s: Amazon is a “malignant monopoly” engaging in predatory pricing, bullying Hachette, and so forth.

Joe Konrath and pseudonymous guest blogger William Ockham have a different point of view. Konrath posted an essay to his blog in which they demolish Stross’s arguments point by point. Most of it is the same argument/counter-argument we’ve been hearing over and over, which I won’t bother to rehash, but Ockham brings up an interesting point.

He reminds us that the Big 5 publishers complained to Judge Cote about Apple’s extended proscription from agency pricing as part of the final judgment in the anti-trust suit, because they wanted to be able to agency price again as soon as their two-year waiting period was up and didn’t want to have a major retailer around who could still offer e-books at a discount.

So, the legacy publishers are starting to be able to negotiate, one by one, with Amazon for new contracts. The first of those is Hachette. Amazon has removed the pre-order buttons on forthcoming Hachette books. Last time a publisher tried to impose agency pricing, Amazon removed the “Buy” buttons from their current books.

But maybe that’s not enough evidence for you. Let me suggest that you find a few Hachette ebooks which are not available for pre-order on Amazon and then go over and look at the prices on Barnes & Noble’s web site. Carefully note the paper list price and the ebook price. When I did this, every single title I checked fell within the non-discountable price bands in Apple’s illegal proposal from January 2010. And if you check the ebook prices for the same books in the iBookstore, you will discover that Apple is offering most of them for less. Because Apple needs to keep its nose clean during its appeal. Hachette has pretty clearly already got B&N to sign on to the non-discountable agency prices (because B&N would love not to have to compete on price with Amazon).

I really don’t understand why this is such a big mystery to people. Hachette is doing what they said they were going to do. Amazon is reacting exactly the way we would expect them to.

A little further down, William adds:

Now, I ask you this. Do you think Amazon is going to give in? I don’t. A long time ago, I read a book that had a very important concept about negotiation. It’s called your BATNA. That stands for Best Alternative To A Negotiated Agreement. You always need to know yours and it really helps if you know the other party’s. I think Amazon has the best BATNA. They just stop carrying Hachette books. Amazon buyers will still be able to get them through third-party sellers on Amazon’s site. Hachette’s BATNA is what, exactly? So, I predict that Hachette will blink. And then we will get to see if any of the other Big 5 publishers want to make a go of it.

The boldest option is for Hachette to play the nuclear card: they can withdraw all their books from Amazon. Hachette could direct readers to more publisher-friendly platforms and stores. Hachette could also make a more concerted effort to develop new channels of distribution. Curiously, neither Hachette nor any other major NY publisher has ever attempted to sell their books in the Smashwords ebook store, despite the fact that Smashwords pays up to 80% list. Publisher insistence on DRM is one of several factors that has locked them into Amazon and locked them out of new outlets. Most of the publishers are also refusing to work with the new ebook subscription services, or have treated libraries as second-class citizens, even though these two channels provide yet another healthy counterbalance to a single retailer’s dominance.

Of course, talk about Hachette selling via Smashwords, or developing its own distribution channel, kind of misses the point. Sure, Hachette could sell its books by Smashwords, its own store, or other means. But given how many people read e-books on their Kindle, and demand the one-touch convenience of instant purchases from their device, they’d lose a lot of business that way.

Again I point to the example of Baen, who had been selling DRM-free e-books on its own for well over a decade but nonetheless found it worthwhile to change the way its entire Webscriptions e-book store worked, up to and including dropping bundles from its back catalog altogether, so it could get its e-books into the Kindle store.

Baen’s e-books had been perfectly Kindle compatible up to that point; you just had to sideload them or email them to your Kindle address. It even had a form on its webpage where you could do just that. But apparently even that was just too much work for customers, who kept scratching their heads in confusion and complaining, “Why aren’t your books on Kindle?” And there were so many of those people who would have bought in a heartbeat via Kindle but couldn’t be bothered to sideload that it was costing Baen more money not to be on Kindle than it lost from angry Webscriptions customers in getting there.

Amazon has done the trick of making e-books easy to purchase even for people who can’t figure out how to program their DVR. (Of course, to be fair, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Apple have done the same, or near enough. But so many more people read via Kindle than via those platforms that it’s still most effectively an advantage for Amazon.) That’s really quite an accomplishment, when you get right down to it, and probably in no small part responsible for Amazon’s domination of the e-book market.

And that’s also what Hachette knows damned well it would be giving up if it pulled its books from Amazon, or allowed Amazon to drop them. Amazon, on the other hand, knows that a minority of its customers even want Hachette books, so if it has to it can do without them for a while.

As far as Amazon is concerned, it has a lot less to lose if it doesn’t cave (no Hachette books until they come crawling back, boo-hoo) than if it does (agency pricing for Hachette, and for everyone else too once the camel’s nose has entered the tent). My suspicion is that if someone ends up pushing the big red button, it won’t be Hachette.

After the negotiations fall through, Amazon will no longer have a contract with Hachette and hence will no longer be able to order books from Hachette’s distributor. So it will have no choice but to remove the buy buttons, because Hachette won’t be selling to it anymore. Of course, it will then be Amazon’s fault for not giving in and costing Hachette a big chunk of sales. Never mind that any store has the right to decide what items it does or does not carry if it feels the terms from the supplier are too onerous.

I would not be at all surprised if that’s how this little game of chicken plays out: no give at all from Amazon, so Hachette will either have to swerve or take the collision head-on and hope its airbag works. Either way, it’ll probably be a few months before we know for sure. Hachette’s contract still has a while to run yet.

(Nate Hoffelder also has a rebuttal to Stross at The Digital Reader, in which he cites yours truly.)

]]>http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/konrath-vs-stross-on-the-amazonhachette-affair/feed/6Sneaking books into bookstores is not a good ideahttp://www.teleread.com/chris-meadows/sneaking-books-into-bookstores-is-not-a-good-idea/
http://www.teleread.com/chris-meadows/sneaking-books-into-bookstores-is-not-a-good-idea/#commentsSun, 25 May 2014 14:36:45 +0000http://www.teleread.com/?p=113209

Here’s another one from the “probably not a good idea” department. Self-published writer Brendan Leonard had a bright idea: he might see if he could get his book more exposure by planting it in a Barnes & Noble store. All that was necessary for it to ring up was to have an ISBN bar code on it, which it did. He then had the idea to use it as an Instagram promotional gimmick: place books in various stores and post their location to Instagram so people could go buy them. Granted that he was giving money away by giving his book away for free, it was still a way to promote it, wasn’t it?

Well, probably not the best one. As some of the comments on the article point out, he’s taking shelf space he hasn’t paid for. Not a lot, but still some. And, as it turns out, it’s not exactly a new idea. Angela Hoy wrote about it in Writers Weekly back in 2011, providing a number of reasons why it is a bad idea. Just a couple of them:

4. Trying to give away copies of your book in this manner isn’t likely to create future sales for your book. Even if the reader is successful in getting your book out the door of the bookstore, chances are that one reader’s interest isn’t going to result in any significant press for your book. You’ll be lucky if they tell a friend or two about it. Tricking stores into stocking a free copy of your book isn’t an effective way to generate publicity.

5. Trying something so many other desperate authors have tried in the past will make you look like…a desperate author. That’s not the impression you want to give bookstores or book buyers. You are a professional author and professionals don’t try to trick bookstores by sneaking free books onto their shelves.

It’s easy to understand why self-pub writers would want to get their books into bookstores. After all, “showrooming” being the thing it is, I have little doubt a lot of people go online to buy books after thumbing through them in a brick and mortar store. But thanks to the way that the large chain brick and mortar bookstores work, indie authors tend to get short shrift there; the big publishers pay the bookstores money to stock and promote their books. Any shelf space they might devote to indie books is shelf space they can’t sell to big publishers for more money. (Indeed, a dispute over those promotional fees was probably behind the dispute that B&N had with Simon & Schuster last year that led to reduced visibility for S&S books in B&N stores until it was resolved.)

But big chain stores aren’t the only stores out there. Indie writers might have better luck approaching the management of their local independent bookstores. These stores often look for ways to differentiate themselves from the big chains, and stocking locally-written books is one such method. They might even have a special shelf devoted just for them, where the book could stand out from all the others. It might not be the Barnes & Noble, but it’s something, and it will earn you a few bucks too.

And if you want to give some books away to promote yourself, you can do better than just squirreling them away in a bookstore. Slap some BookCrossing stickers on them and put them in places like doctor’s or dentist’s office waiting rooms, laundromats, and other places where a little reading material might come in handy. (Not post offices or other government offices, though; they have regulations against that.) In such places, the book won’t compete with other books, and it may well even be read…and then passed on to someone else to be read again.

Either way, it doesn’t seem likely that giving physical books away will necessarily lead to more sales. Promotionally speaking, you would have better luck promoting yourself through a blog, or making appearances at heavily-attended conventions such as GenCon to meet people who are actually fans of your genre.

There are plenty of other things you can do to promote yourself besides sneaking your books into a bookstore, and a lot of them even work better. Really, it’s just not a good idea.

So, there’s a thing. Over on The Passive Voice, and some other blogs with similar points of view, they refer to it as “Amazon Derangement Syndrome (ADS),” for the way a certain class of people seem to like to run around like chickens with their heads cut off whenever the evil Amazon does another evil thing evilly.

Now, I’ll grant that ADS might not be the best term to go around using if you want to engage in serious discourse, given that the sort of people who toss it around are likely to be just as opinionated in favor of Amazon as the alleged ADS “sufferers” are against it. All the same, it’s kind of telling that there’s enough of this kind of sentiment going around that people have actually coined a cutesy term for it.

It’s entirely understandable that some people, especially the authors getting caught in the middle of the dispute, would be inclined to blame Amazon rather than their publisher. After all, their publisher is the one who’s directly paying them money. And they want to think their publisher has a stake in the success of their books, since those are the way the publishers make their money, too.

But on the other hand, we have agents and authors contending that Hachette had been delaying shipments of books to Amazon as early as November, or as recently as April. The thing is that it takes two to tango. You need two hands to make a clap, you need two teams to hold a tug-of-war. If Amazon is throwing its weight around, then guess what? Hachette is throwing its weight around, too.

Both Amazon and Hachette are invested in getting Hachette books to customers, because that’s how they both make their money. And anything that either one of them does that keeps Hachette books from getting to customers hurts them both and they both know it. If Amazon loses Hachette books, it’s just lost a big chunk of what customers go there for, and if Hachette loses Amazon distribution it’s just lost 20% of its paper sales and at least 60% of its e-book sales. It just comes down to how much money each of them should make.

And when you’ve got two parties fighting over slices of the same pie, the only means either one has of putting pressure on the other is going to hurt them both. So what these negotiations come down to is a big old game of chicken, with each side seeing just how far the other is willing to let them go.

You don’t just get Amazon throwing its weight around to try to hurt Hachette, you get Hachette throwing its weight around to try to hurt Amazon, too. Either way, both Amazon and Hachette feel the pain from things either one of them does. And, of course, anything that hurts Hachette is, in turn, going to hurt the authors Hachette pays…whether it was Amazon who did it or Hachette.

Of course, publishers are the proverbial men who buy ink by the barrel that you’re not supposed to pick a fight with. The Big Five are all part of media conglomerates that have their own news divisions, in addition to having a whole bunch of authors (many of whom blog) in their pockets. So invariably, the narrative we end up seeing all over the place is that, if Amazon takes a hard line, Amazon is evil. If Hachette takes a hard line, and does something that will adversely affect its authors, like delaying shipments, it’s because the evil intractable Amazon made Hachette do it. Heads I win, tails you lose.

Any time you see a narrative that puts all the blame on Amazon without recognizing Hachette has to be pushing things from its side, too, you ought to be at least a little suspicious. You don’t get to blame Amazon for everything just because it’s big. Hachette is pretty darned big, too, but like all the major publishers, it just loves playing the victim card when it doesn’t get its way.

I wonder just how far both sides will be willing to go before one or the other caves? Would Hachette dare to pull all its books from Amazon unilaterally and let them stew? Would Amazon dare to remove the buy buttons again, as with Macmillan (rather than just removing pre-order buttons), and let Hachette stew?

I’m sure it won’t come to that. Sooner or later, one side or the other will cave, because that’s what these negotiations are for. And it’ll all be over until the next big publisher has to enter into contract negotiations with Amazon, a few months down the line. I suppose we might as well get used to seeing Amazon Derangement Syndrome writ large across the blogosphere, because something tells me it’s going to be with us for a while.

Chris estimates that Amazon sells 60% of Hachette’s ebooks (the most profitable books any publisher sells). In the comments on another Amazon/Hachette post, someone calculated that Hachette sales represent less than two-tenths of one percent of Amazon’s business.

As PG mentioned in a much earlier post, higher prices for BigPub books and the lack of availability of BigPub books help the sales of indie authors more than anyone else.

It’s a good point. Apple’s e-book store was able to get by without Random House (the biggest Big Six publisher at the time, while Hachette is now one of the smallest) for a year. If necessary, Amazon might be able to do without Hachette for a while.

It would almost be amusing to see that happen, for Amazon to go right past removing buy buttons and simply delisting all Hachette books en masse from its store. “Oh, we’re not playing games, we’ve just decided we don’t want to carry your books anymore. Don’t let the screen door hit your bum on the way out.”